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Works for me. I just went to http://safari.oreilly.com. Must have been a temporary error?

Having been reading back and forth between a Kindle and the Kindle iphone app while on vacation in Europe, I'd say that the iPhone makes a perfectly good ebook reader. We don't need ebook reader hardware - I believe that will be a niche product. We need good ebook reader software that isn't just from Amazon and that supports epub and other industry standard formats. We had Stanza, but Amazon bought them, so we're back to one dominant vendor pushing a proprietary ebook format.

All publishers should be providing ebooks in epub format, readable by any reader, and resold by any retailer.

We'd love to see Safari on the Kindle too. But that's not up to us. Please let Amazon know that you'd like this.

Boy, do I agree. Whup us upside the head for not updating this sooner!

Just to be clear, you can get ebooks from oreilly.com (pdf, mobi or epub format) and load them onto your kindle. You can also buy PDFs of our books from Amazon. The biggest obstacle to getting our books on the kindle is the lack of support for tables.

If we sell you a book, and it looks like crap, will you be happy? Will you blame us, or Amazon?

We're working with Amazon on these issues.

FWIW, I do think it's important to create a multi-player ebook marketplace, but I'm a lot less worried about that than I was a year ago. With alternatives like Stanza taking off on smartphones, I don't think we have to worry about Amazon cornering the market with a DRMed format. In fact, because I think the non-DRMed formats will become more popular, I'm fairly confident that they will eventually drop their DRM.

So at this point, the only thing keeping us off the kindle are the formatting issues. – timoreilly, on March 14, 2009 01:26

We just didn't get enough local support for the event to continue it. We'd love to do more in Europe, but it's a hard place to do conferences, with far less entrepreneurial activity than the US (see Michael Arrington's comments about this same subject regarding LeWeb at http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/13/... and http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/13/...), an expectation of much lower prices for attendance, and fewer available sponsors. This makes the events un-economic.

In addition, there's a fair amount of regionalism, despite the promises of the EU. A conference in Germany draws mainly Germans; a conference in France draws mainly French; a conference in the UK draws mainly English. We've tried neutral locations like Amsterdam and Brussels, but they didn't live up to their promise either. Frankly, we get most of the same people who come to our European events to come to our US events. And now that we're doing some east coast events, that helps make the travel at least a bit less.

We'd love to do more events in Europe, but especially with the economy as it is, we can't justify it. It's a bit of "you get what you pay for." Europeans don't seem to value the events as much as we hoped they would, and so we don't do them.

I recognize that this is a problem, and we know that there is a big audience of people who do care about the kind of technology conferences we put on, but so far, our European conferences just haven't been as successful as the corresponding events in the US, and they are even more work to put on.

We'd love to develop a new European conference strategy, but right now, we're scratching our heads. Ideas welcome.

I just looked at the promo page you cited (this is the first time I've seen it), and I agree that it is potentially confusing, but I have a hard time seeing it as deceptive. It doesn't promise free full book downloads. It is contrasting the two subscription options, and saying that one allows you to download full books, while the other does not.

Not only that, this is an invitation to a free trial, during which any limitations will become clear. So it's hard to see this as being deceptive. No one is getting charged any money before they know the rules.

I know this sounds like "inside baseball," but the ability to download full books, even for an additional price, is controversial for some publishers who provide titles for the service. They worry that this will lead to increased piracy. That's why it's not available at all levels of the service. So from their point of view, the ability to download books at all is a privilege worthy of being called out, and an incentive for people to move up to the higher level subscription.

I do understand your confusion, though. To consumers, the promise of full book downloads can easily suggest unlimited full book downloads. But I don't think Safari ever suggests that. The way they see it, they are offering an added-value privilege.

However, I will talk with them about trying to clarify the offer.

By the way, you don't have to pay extra for downloads. You can save up your tokens. You can think of tokens as discount coupons. (I've urged Safari to reframe them that way.) You can use them to reduce the price of book downloads, or your can save them up to get free books. If you are a subscriber for a year, you will accumulate sixty tokens, which should be enough for four full book downloads. At the current price of those downloads bought separately (even assuming the publishers in question offer them), that comes to almost 25% of the full price of Safari.

Safari is an alternate business model for accessing online books, just as Rhapsody is an alternative to iTunes. The fact that Safari is giving you credit towards individual purchases on the iTunes model as well as an "all you can eat" subscription seems like a benefit to me. I pay $14.95 for Rhapsody, but if I want a take-away copy of any of the songs I listen to there, I have to go over to iTunes, where I pay full price. If Rhapsody offered downloads, and gave me a 25% discount coupon relative to the price on iTunes, I'd think that was a pretty good deal.

There's one other issue. Imagine for a moment that you got your wish, and you had a free full book download each month. At that point, you'd have the full value of safari in free book downloads, PLUS access to all the thousands of books available in tethered mode online.

Sounds great from a consumer point of view, and it would make Safari even more of a compelling value proposition than it is - but there's a rub. One of the things we need to do in Safari is to have a method for allocating value to participating authors and publishers. Right now, we do that based on usage. But if we provide all the value via downloads, how do we compensate the authors of the books accessed online?

Safari is trying to balance multiple constituencies, generating royalties to authors that will be sufficient to keep them motivated to keep writing books even as the physical book channel declines, while providing sufficient value to readers that they want to subscribe. We may not always get it right, but we are doing our best.

I should also be clear that Safari is not under the sole control of O'Reilly. It is a separate company, a joint venture between O'Reilly and the Pearson Technology Group. We have board-level input but not direct control over Safari's marketing offers. They will be reading my input here as well as yours, and presumably taking it under advisement.

Ness,

First off, I checked, and it looks like they could make the opt-in clearer. The way it's designed, I think you could sign up without meaning to. I'll make sure we fix that.

The team also said that they have been having some problems with the vendor handling the email lists regarding timely processing of unsubscribe requests. (Basically, we use a list broker to make sure that sponsors who get one time use of the list don't just slurp it in and use it repeatedly -- for exactly the reason that concerns us both.) We're debugging this problem right now.

I'm a bit puzzled, though, about your assertion that you've been receiving lots of email messages since attending the conference. I had the team send me copies of every message that was sent out to people on the opt-in list, and of the total of 15 emails that were sent out, only three were sent after the conference. The others were sent out in the months leading up to the conference, and include notifications of events (like workshops and parties) at the conference.

So if you've been getting lots of messages since the conference, someone has managed to get a hold of the list and is using it in unauthorized ways.

But in any event, I am sorry that you had this bad experience. Thanks for letting us know, so we can fix it.

I am REALLY worried about what you say. Can you please send me, tim at oreilly.com examples of the spam messages you've gotten? What do you mean by "aggressive" spam messages? Lots of messages from lots of sponsors, or more than one message from the same sponsor? And what kind of spam from O'Reilly?

Our conference team assures me that the only emails go out to people who've opted in to receive messages from conference sponsors.

In addition to everything else, I will personally review how the opt-in is handled, and how easy it is to miss. We can check to see if you're on that opt-in list, and how you got there, since you obviously don't remember signing up for email from sponsors.

I'll also look at the unsubscribe process.

I very much agree with you that a company can really screw its reputation by having stuff come across as spam.

I'll add to what Allen said: we already have lots of returned/unsalable books from the way that big bookstore chains shuffle books back and forth (they return and re-order rather than moving from one store or warehouse to another). We give lots away to various projects overseas, etc.

And of course, asking people to return them (and then shipping them out again) would have a significant energy and packaging cost.

That's why we give the discount without requiring the return.

But thanks so much for thinking of this.

Yeah, it's pretty easy (unless they've changed it in 2.0). Just hold your finger down on the icon till all the icons start to wiggle. Then drag it where you want it. Hit the home button to stop the wiggling and set the new arrangement as final.

Back in the mid-90s, we did a major promotion with the Species Survival Commission, soliciting donations from our customers with an offer of a 100% match. We had very poor response. We made some big donations anyway, but didn't continue doing it because our customers seemed so uninterested.

It's definitely worth re-evaluating given the greater sensitivity of the market to this issue today.

We've proposed that to Amazon, and will continue to suggest it, but they are the folks you need to be asking about this. They seem pretty intent on providing content that they control, and I think they see Safari as a competitor. But we'd jump on this.

That being said, all of the same issues discussed previously, about the Kindle's lack of monospace font support, apply to Safari on the kindle. – timoreilly, on May 13, 2008 00:46

Viren -- it isn't something WE can change. Amazon has no support for monospaced fonts on the Kindle. We've told them about this problem, and we believe they will eventually address it. But it's not something that's under our control. – timoreilly, on May 04, 2008 18:39

Tony,

It might help if you told us why you needed this information. I can tell you "very well," and suggest you check public sources like Amazon's computer bestseller list to confirm. To give more specific details than that, I'd have to know more about you and how the information might be used.

Sorry. You're right. I'm afraid that there are no plans that I'm aware of to update Running Mac OS X. But your interest may cause the editors and authors to take another look.

It's already available: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/978059...

In fact it is our fastest-selling new release ever.

Just heard from Adam Witwer, who manages conversions to Safari, who wrote: "The conversion house took longer than expected on this title because of several inline graphics. We finally received the files from them yesterday. Loading the book into kurt [our internal data store, kurt loader] and posting it on Safari will be high priority on Monday.